Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  Part of the reason was that the Vietnamese, the begetters of the Cambodian communist movement, were overwhelmed by their own problems. A shadowy ‘Work Committee’, headed by a southern Vietnamese who used the alias Hay So, had been set up in Phnom Penh by the VWP’s Southern Bureau, the future Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), to handle liaison with the Khmers.* But its main concern in the late 1950s was the safety of its own leadership. In 1957 the Southern Bureau itself was forced to take refuge in the Cambodian capital to escape the wave of repression unleashed by the South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. Le Duan, soon to be designated Ho Chi Minh’s heir apparent, was based there for part of that year. The Southern Bureau continued to operate clandestinely from safe houses in Phnom Penh until 1959, when guerrilla fighting resumed in the south and it re-based inside Vietnam. In practice, so long as the Cambodian Communists did nothing which might jeopardise Hanoi’s relationship with Sihanouk, they were left to go their own way. The links with the Vietnamese ‘elder brother’ slowly weakened. Speaking many years later, Sâr argued that this had been a good thing because ‘it gave us the chance to be independent and to develop our movement ourselves’. But to the beleaguered little group of Khmer communists, trying desperately to survive on their own, it cannot have seemed like that at the time.

  More fundamental, however, was the Cambodian Party’s crisis of identity. The PRPK, to which all Khmer communists theoretically belonged, was not even a proper communist party. How could one be a communist as a member of a party which was not?

  Those like Sâr, Sok Knaol and Mey Mann, who had belonged to the French and Indochinese Parties, insisted in later life, not always truthfully, that they had never been officially inducted into the PRPK but had been members of ‘the Cambodian section of the ICP’. In Mann’s words: ‘It was all very vague. There wasn’t a proper structure . . . We had a leadership core . . . and [we] worked together. We felt we were members of the Communist Party, but what communist party I couldn’t say’ Sâr spoke in similar terms. From the mid-1950s, they began referring to their movement among themselves not as ‘the Party’ but as angkar padevat, the ‘revolutionary organisation’, or more often just as Angkar.

  In 1957, Tou Samouth, Sâr and Nuon Chea began drafting a new political programme and statutes for a re-launched Cambodian Party to replace the PRPK, which they regarded more and more as an alien implant. The revived party would be allied with, but not subordinate to, the Vietnamese. A recruitment drive was launched, based on the Viet Minh principle of ‘quality rather than quantity’. In practice, this meant building up core groups, ‘one member at a time’, as Pham Van Ba had taught them in the maquis, and then gradually, after a lengthy apprenticeship, inducting into the movement those who had proved themselves. Suong Sikoeun, then nineteen years old and in his final year at the Lycée Sisowath, was among the new intake:

  We used to meet once a week at a worker’s house in the southern part of the city. Every time I left home, I wondered whether I would get back that night. Because it was clandestine. I used to imagine that someone might shoot at me. We always told the cyclo driver to drop us some way beyond, and then walked back making sure that no one was following. . .

  The meetings used to last about two hours, from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. . . . Mainly we talked about the political situation — there was very little discussion of ideology . . . The [political] line was essentially the same as what we read in the left-wing press: neutrality, a parliamentary system, multi-party democracy and constitutional monarchy. The difference was that now we were members of an organisation, with its own internal discipline and rules . . . [One of the rules was that] we each had to contact three or four potential sympathisers and then observe them over a long period to see how they behaved. Eventually, the most progressive element among them might be asked to join the cell . . . They were cells, not discussion groups. But they were the cells of a party that was still in the process of being formed.

  To Sikoeun, the conspiratorial side of the movement was part of the attraction. That was true for Sâr, too. He did not take part in cell meetings — nor did Tou Samouth or Nuon Chea — to avoid the risk of exposure. But he organised informal gatherings with groups of students at his home, a brick-built Chinese-style house, not far from Tou Samouth’s dwelling, to which he and Ponnary had moved soon after Ieng Sary’s return. The house was spotlessly clean, one participant remembered, but almost bare except for a few books and some Chinese prints on the walls. Sâr led the discussions and encouraged the others to speak out, but apart from criticising corruption never revealed his own political stance. Ieng Sary and Son Sen who, after returning from France, had become Director of Studies at the Phnom Penh Teacher Training College, chaired similar discussion groups and participated in cell meetings like those which Suong Sikoeun attended. At a still more restricted level, Samouth, Sâr and Nuon Chea held political training seminars in safe houses for the most reliable elements, essentially those who had joined the PCF or the ICP in the pre-Geneva period and a handful of younger people who had proved their loyalty.

  The movement was hardly flourishing, but by the summer, at least in Phnom Penh, it was no longer in decline. Chamraon Vichea and the two other ‘progressive’ schools in the capital, Kampuj’bot and Sotoân Prychea In, were staffed largely by communists, and growing numbers of students were being attracted to the cause. Core groups existed at the Lycée Sisowath, where Ponnary and her sister Thirith taught; at the Teacher Training College; and at the Sisowath Alumni Association, headed by Sâr’s protégé Sok Knaol. Similar networks were being built up in provincial cities, including Battambang and Kompong Cham.

  Sihanouk, whose intuition in such matters was finely honed, sensed the danger.

  In August 1957, he summoned the leaders of the Democratic Party, whose continued existence afforded a kind of vicarious protection for all with left-wing views, to a debate at the Royal Palace before an audience packed with his own supporters, which was broadcast over loudspeakers to a crowd of several thousand outside. As they left, after five hours of public humiliation, they were dragged from their cars and beaten with rifle-butts by palace guards. For the next two nights, soldiers from the Phnom Penh garrison, encouraged by the right-wing Chief of Staff, Lon Nol, rampaged through the streets, shouting ‘Death to the Democrats’ and molesting indiscriminately any Cambodian, Chinese or Vietnamese unfortunate enough to cross their path. To demonstrate Sihanouk’s magnanimity, the party was not banned outright but allowed to limp on until the parliamentary elections next spring, when it decided not to field any candidates.

  The following month, September, the Prince announced the foundation of a government movement, the Royal Socialist Khmer Youth, whose primary mission was to prevent young people being seduced by communist propaganda.

  Next came the turn of the Pracheachon, which decided, ‘not without courage . . . given the physical risks involved’, as one Western Ambassador noted, to put up candidates in the capital and four rural constituencies. Sihanouk seized the occasion to launch a violent anti-communist crusade, travelling in person to all five electoral districts to denounce his opponents’ ‘anti-national’ policies. His movement, the Sangkum, put up gory posters of communist terror attacks against Khmer civilians, dating from the war, and Radio Phnom Penh accused the Prince’s opponents of being puppets of the hated Vietnamese. The Pracheachon ran a skilful campaign, presenting its candidates as local men, who ‘travel on foot and by ox-cart and understand local problems’, unlike their rivals from the Sangkum, who came in fleets of American cars. But it made no difference. Systematic intimidation forced four of the five to drop out. The only one who stayed the course, Keo Meas, in Phnom Penh, was credited with a mere 396 votes from an electorate of more than 30,000.

  As if that were not enough, later the same year it was discovered that the Party leader Sieu Heng, and a Pracheachon member, Penn Yuth, had been working as government informers. Exactly when their betrayal began was never clearly established. Nor was i
t known how much Sieu Heng had told the police. He had been under suspicion within the Party for some time and Tou Samouth had taken steps to limit his access to information. But it is also likely that he held back much of what he knew, for his niece was married to Nuon Chea, and neither Nuon nor any of the other central leaders appears to have been compromised by his betrayal. The most serious effect of his action was to sever all communication between Phnom Penh and the rural networks. Already sorely tried by lassitude and government repression, these now imploded altogether. Of the 850 Party members in 1957, by the end of the decade only 250 remained.

  Treason was in fashion in Cambodia in the late 1950s.

  Sihanouk had a keen nose for those who showed signs of acquiring more power than was good for him. In the summer of 1957, he began to smell trouble in the shape of his Minister of State, Sam Sary, whom he packed off to London a few months later to serve as Ambassador to the Court of St James’s. Unfortunately, Sary was still the same ‘sulfurous and vindictive personality’ who, as a young magistrate, had gained a reputation for beating prisoners. This time he beat up a young woman, described at first as his children’s governess. Soeung Son Maly, Saloth Sâr’s old flame, now Sary’s junior wife — for apparently it was she — went to the British police. The Embassy then issued a statement claiming that such behaviour was normal in Cambodia. The resulting scandal, amplified when the newspapers discovered that the ‘governess’ was in fact Sary’s concubine and had recently borne him a child, led to his immediate recall.

  Sâr’s reaction is not recorded. But Sihanouk was furious. Not, as he explained later, because of what Sam Sary had done, but because of the discredit his behaviour had brought on Cambodia. Over the next few months, the ex-Minister moved gradually into open opposition, launching a newspaper to propagate his views and attempting, unsuccessfully, to form his own political party as a rival to the Sangkum. The Americans and their regional allies, the Thais and the South Vietnamese — ever anxious to find a counterweight to Sihanouk, if not an outright replacement — egged him on from behind the scenes.

  Then, at the beginning of 1959, the Chinese and French governments got wind of a plot by Cambodia’s two neighbours to overthrow the monarchy, proclaim a republic and install Son Ngoc Thanh, who had been in exile in Thailand since the 1955 elections, as Head of State. The French took the affair seriously enough for their Foreign Minister, Louis Joxe, to warn the US Ambassador that in France’s view, such a move would be ‘a huge mistake’ and against Western interests. When Sihanouk was told, he immediately assumed that Sary was implicated. Fearing for his life, on January 20 the ex-Minister fled to Thailand where he joined Son Ngoc Thanh, thereby confirming the Prince in his conviction that Thanh, Sary, the Thais, the South Vietnamese and, at least tacitly, the Americans, were all party to a vast conspiracy which he baptised the ‘Bangkok Plot’. Whether Sary was really involved or fell victim to a machination that was not of his making is another matter. For the next three years he was described as one of the leaders of Thanh’s Khmer Serei movement until, during a visit to Laos, he disappeared. It emerged later that he had been murdered, either by Sihanouk’s agents or by his own associates.

  If Sary’s role remains obscure, no such doubt exists about the ‘Bangkok Plot’ itself.

  Shortly before Sary’s departure for London, another pillar of the regime, Dap Chhuon, was also removed from the government, in which, as Security Minister, he had been one of Sihanouk’s favoured instruments for terrorising opponents.

  Chhuon returned to his old fiefdom of Siem Reap with the title of Royal Legate, which in practice gave him vast powers over most of northern Cambodia. But Sihanouk must have wondered whether such an energetic and unscrupulous man, having experienced national office, would be satisfied indefinitely with a provincial post, no matter how important, and when Chhuon asked to be made Legate of Battambang, which since the days of the Thai occupation had been the most rebellious province in the country, he prudently refused. Over the next twelve months, Chhuon’s disaffection grew. In private, he denounced what he called Sihanouk’s ‘pro-communist policies’ and ostentatiously refused to participate in ‘voluntary’ manual labour, which the Prince, inspired by the example of China’s Great Leap Forward, had made compulsory for all government officials. He toyed with the idea of splitting Siem Reap from the rest of the country and setting up an independent northern Cambodian regime with the support of the Thais (which was exactly what Sihanouk had feared he might do, had he become Legate at Battambang). But before he could make up his mind to act, South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem, infuriated by Cambodia’s tolerance of Viet Minh activities on its territory, approved a proposal by the South Vietnamese Ambassador to Phnom Penh, Ngo Trong Hieu, to ‘organise a coup d’état to get rid of Sihanouk’. In December 1958, they approached Chhuon to carry it out.

  This was the plot which the Chinese and French intelligence services had uncovered.

  In February, a month after Sam Sary’s defection, the conspirators went into action. Several planeloads of arms arrived in Siem Reap from Thailand, and Ngo Trong Hieu himself flew in from Saigon with 100 kilograms of gold bars to finance the rebellion. A few days later, another Vietnamese plane arrived bringing two powerful transmitters, to be used for propaganda broadcasts by the new regime.

  It is possible that by then Chhuon had got cold feet and decided to change sides. In this version of events, he himself tipped off Phnom Penh that the South Vietnamese were trying to suborn him and assured Sihanouk of his loyalty. If so, the Prince was sceptical. He ordered his Chief of Staff, Lon Nol, to nip the rebellion in the bud, recover the gold ingots and kill Chhuon and his closest associates. When Nol’s troops invested Siem Reap on February 22, they encountered no resistance. Chhuon and several of his officers were captured and afterwards killed. Three other Cambodians, including Chhuon’s brother, and two Vietnamese, were sentenced to death by a military tribunal and executed in public by firing squad.

  But the story did not end there.

  Six months later, in an attempt to put relations back on a more normal footing, Sihanouk visited Saigon at Ngo Dinh Diem’s invitation. Four weeks after his return, on August 30 1959, two gift boxes were delivered to the palace, one for the royal chamberlain — which, on being opened, was found to contain an elegant set of smoking implements — the other for Queen Kossamak. The chamberlain had no opportunity to give the second box to the Queen until the following evening. On her instructions he began to unpack it, at which point the King, who was also present, remembered that a group of officials was waiting for them in the audience chamber. Moments after they left the room, the box exploded with such force that it blew a hole in the reinforced concrete floor, killing the chamberlain and another official instantly. A third man died later from injuries and two others were seriously hurt. Once again, the finger of suspicion pointed at South Vietnam.*

  These bizarre events had far-reaching repercussions.

  Political murder, which until then had been limited to peripheral excesses by low-level officials, mainly during election campaigns, moved on to the national stage. A taboo had been broken. Cambodian politics had never been for the faint-hearted, but now the risk of violent death became a recognised part of the political game.

  Relations with both Cambodia’s neighbours took a nosedive from which they never recovered. Diplomatic ties with Thailand, suspended in October 1958 over a territorial dispute, were finally broken off in 1961 and with South Vietnam in 1963.

  But most serious of all, Cambodia’s relationship with the United States was damaged beyond repair. Behind Bangkok and Saigon, behind Sam Sary and Dap Chhuon, behind Ngo Dinh Nhu’s parcel bomb and Son Ngoc Thanh’s Khmer Serei, Sihanouk saw the malign hand of Washington. At the time, his claims seemed far-fetched and, to most Americans, downright absurd. But the evidence that emerged later was damning. The low blows to which Cambodia was subjected from the mid-1950s on, in total disregard of the accepted principles of international relations,
were almost without exception the result of secret US government directives.

  In 1956, when Cambodia became the first non-communist country to be granted Chinese aid, Thailand and South Vietnam, at America’s prompting, imposed an economic blockade. Under pressure from US allies, it was lifted. But the CIA continued to cultivate Son Ngoc Thanh — still viewed in Washington as a possible alternative to Sihanouk — and the US Embassy in Phnom Penh had standing orders to seek out other personalities and political forces to counter the Prince’s ‘left-wing policies’. Sam Sary, acclaimed by the State Department as ‘the staunchest friend of the United States in Cambodia’, had been sent on a three-month study visit to America, as had Dap Chhuon’s brother. Chhuon himself was viewed favourably by the administration as ‘an anti-communist warlord’. Surreptitious support for Sihanouk’s pro-Western opponents ‘to reverse the drift towards pro-Communist neutrality’ was reaffirmed in a National Security Council directive in April 1958. By then, there was serious tension on the border with South Vietnam. But when Sihanouk threatened retaliation, he was told by the US Ambassador that if American-supplied equipment was used against ‘a friendly power’, military aid would be suspended. The contrast with US behaviour towards countries it considered to be allies was flagrant. When Thai troops occupied an ancient Cambodian temple complex on their common border, the Americans remained silent.

  To Washington’s extreme displeasure, the Prince then upgraded relations with China, which had previously been at the level of trade missions, by approving an exchange of resident ambassadors. The US began actively seeking ways to bring him down.

  After Sam Sary’s efforts came to naught — efforts, the French Foreign Ministry noted in a secret memorandum, ‘which the United States probably . . . did not initiate, but certainly knew of and did nothing to discourage’ — the Americans switched their attention to Dap Chhuon. Here the US role was more direct. President Eisenhower was informed in January 1959 that preparations for a coup were under way. A CIA agent at the American Embassy in Phnom Penh, Victor Matsui, was detailed to liaise with the rebels and gave Chhuon a transceiver ‘to keep the Embassy informed’.